2605.02685 Reservoir Agent: A Fixed Random Reservoir Injected Into a Pretrained Transformer for Cross-Pass State
Can a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir (echo state network) injected into a pretrained transformer's mid-layer attention give the model genuine state BETWEEN forward passes -- a real time axis -- without degrading its base capabilities, and what reservoir-dynamics regime makes that injected state usable signal rather than noise? This is a small-scale FEASIBILITY + DYNAMICS study (GPT-2 scale, single machine), not an agentic-capability demonstration; the tasks are deliberately minimal probes chosen to isolate one mechanism each.